Subject: Re: VRML Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 09:15:50 -0700 From: "Scott A. Friedman" Organization: UCLA Department of Architecture + Urban Design To: Robert Jenkins Hi, You first need your nameless XXXXXX friends to provide you with a translator to get you from Microstation to VRML 1.x or 2.0 I think Microstation might even write Inventor files which would get you someplace faster. However, direct support is always nicer because then they can worry about polygon orientation, mesh optimization etc. After that, it's more or less just a matter of loading up your VRML files into a browser. Once you have geometry you can start thinking about interaction and making links. This is the easy part. The hard part is getting your geometry from something relatively stupid like a CAD program into something a real-time rendering engine can deal with efficiently. This is almost always easier said than done. If you have detailed CAD models they will have to be simplified if you expect anybody to look at them. VRML is still VERY SLOW for most people with PC's and modems - you need to think about them. Also, texture mapping is a problem 99.9% of everyone out there cannot deal with so you have to be clever in order to work around this limitation. You may want to look into some of the PC based VRML tools that are available. I do not have much direct experience with these but hear some of them are okay. Scott -- Scott A. Friedman University of California at Los Angeles o:310.206.4793 Department of Architecture + Urban Design f:310.825.7745 Box 951467 / Perloff Hall p:310.875.2666 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1467 mailto:friedman@ucla.edu | http://www.aud.ucla.edu/~friedman pgp : F1 9C 1C 50 0B FC 22 B7 49 86 15 18 C3 C8 29 16